


the dirt in which our roots may grow

by nicheinhischest



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, M/M, set after ch.64 of the raven king
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 13:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8058538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicheinhischest/pseuds/nicheinhischest
Summary: Adam closes his eyes and breathes in. Opens them and breathes out. Unfurls his hands and curls them back up experimentally. Everything hurts. There are cuts on the knuckles, jagged scrapes and bruises on the backs of them. His right wrist feels sprained. Each of his fingers aches from being pulled back too far, bent in all the wrong ways. But they're his own now, entirely. He knows they're his own.





	

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  please forgive any inconsistencies – i've only read trk once, the day it came out.   
> 
> 
> [north - sleeping at last](https://youtu.be/2WpvCPTjgO8)

* * *

The sky opens up the night Gansey dies.

This is what Adam will remember forever: mud-caked shoes and grime under his fingernails. Raw wrists recently unbound and a pulsing, leftover ache behind his eyes. The bitter wind snapping the wet, ripped sleeve of his shirt against his arm like a whip. An unbearable, horrific cold seeping deep into his bones. His heart beating wild and hard in his chest while Ronan sits in the driver’s seat and fades away.

And the look on Gansey’s face, right before Blue kisses him.

* * *

When Gansey falls, Noah wails a low, terrible sound –otherworldly and desolate– from somewhere Adam can't see anymore before flickering out of existence. Adam takes a few stumbling steps backwards until his feet trip over something (more flowers, more dream-things spilling out of the car) and he tumbles and lands on his ass, hands braced behind him. His ribcage feels compressed, heart on fucking fire, burning right through his chest, his body trying to shove the pain out of him because it’s too much, it’s too much, it’s _too much_ —

“Well,” Henry says to no one, on his knees in the dirt. He pauses, and then covers his eyes with a hand and slumps forward.

Blue is eerily silent as she kneels in the grass, one hand grasping the front of Gansey’s borrowed sweater, the other brushing his hair back. She’s bent over with her head resting on his chest, shivering. It’s the worst thing to see, the worst kind of pain to feel: when it’s _too fucking much_ and nothing –not screaming, not crying, not destroying every breakable thing in this world including yourself until it’s nothing but dust and rubble– will make this kind of hurt stop.

From the car, Ronan inhales sharp, rasping, and comes back to life. Adam wants to vomit, wants to sob until he’s bone dry, but instead he mechanically pushes himself up, just enough. The driver's side door is already wrenched open, and Adam touches Ronan’s wrist, his elbow, his shoulder. Ronan opens his eyes.

“Gansey?” he asks, halting, afraid, and whatever answer held in Adam's brow, in his mouth, in the slightest tremble to his chin, has Ronan choke out a noise Adam never wants to hear again.

Ronan rattles the car in his haste to get out, trips onto the pavement, his hands catching his fall at the last second. He heaves himself up, stands straight with flowers and blood rain piled around his feet and stares at Blue six feet from them, cradling the body of someone who can never love her back, not anymore.

Adam lets out a breath until his insides feel emptied.

The deluge doesn’t stop.

But this isn't how the story ends.

* * *

Morning is just about to break on their way to 300 Fox Way (because five rain-and-blood-and-black-ooze spattered teens and a hooved girl are just a _bit_ too conspicuous for a hospital), and aside from Blue's soft directions to Henry, there's only this:

The sudden quiet of the night, the heaviness of their limbs settling. The charge in the air at the knowledge that things, now more than ever, will not be the same, cannot be the same.

No one mentions Noah.

* * *

Each of them are handed at least two cups of terrible tea within an hour of walking into the kitchen; everyone is seen to, and the gouge in Adam's cheek is mended the best it can on the promise that he goes to the hospital tomorrow. There is some yelling, and a lot of crying, and in the end, it's nice and familial and entirely too suffocating. But still, _still_ , there Gansey sits at the kitchen table. Alive.

The “and well” is yet to be seen, but other than an unsteady gait, he's – okay.

Here.

Adam wants to touch him; Ronan can't seem to stop. He’s lost too much already, Adam thinks, so he keeps his hand on Gansey's shoulder as he sits in the chair diagonal to him, fingers dug in just a bit, grounding, like maybe Gansey will disappear otherwise. Adam is not entirely sure that won't still happen. They’re talking in low voices to Maura about something or other. Henry is leaning against the counter, feet crossed at the ankles, warily eyeing both the cup in his hands and Orphan Girl blinking up at him, the tiny, cardboard end of a tea bag dangling from a string in her mouth. Blue is gathered close to Orla, tender in a way she never is with her cousin, her eye patched up expertly by one of her more medically inclined family members.

There is noise, all around them. It's soft, and warm, and vital, and a few hours ago, a demon with Adam's eyes and Adam's hands tried to kill half the people in this room.

He slips out quietly, to the familiar jungle of Blue’s backyard, and sits on the bottom step. He closes his eyes and breathes in. Opens them, and breathes out. Unfurls his hands, and curls them back up experimentally. Everything hurts. They're clean now, but there are still cuts on the knuckles, jagged scrapes and bruises on the backs of them. His right wrist feels sprained, even with a wrap. Each of his fingers aches from being pulled back too far, bent in all the wrong ways. But they're his own now, entirely. 

He knows they're his own.

* * *

Adam doesn't look up when someone finally comes out some time later; he's not even sure how he knows it's Blue before she sits next to him on the bottom step. She's showered and changed, finally, into a cut up T-shirt and bright orange pajama bottoms. Damp hair curls softly behind her ears.

When he lifts his head, he doesn't know where to look: at the way she's picking at the skin around her fingernails, at the knitted up gash at her eye. There'll probably be a scar, this time. 

Adam opens his mouth.

Blue says tiredly, “I'll kick you in the shin if you say sorry.”

Adam closes his mouth. 

“Well,” he says, after a moment. “I can think it.”

Blue touches her fingers to the edge of the new stitches, and then his hand. 

“When he – when Gansey lying there,” she starts, careful, the tips of her fingers pressed gently to his knuckles. “I kept thinking of all the little things we'd lose.”

 _We_ , she says. _We_ , and she doesn't mean the three of them, she means _Gansey and I_. Because she loves him. Because, right at that moment in the middle of the field, she _loved_ him, and he knew he was going to die but he kissed her anyway; he kissed her anyway, because he wasn't going to leave without knowing how it felt.

She smiles, close-mouthed. “It was weird. Like this catalogued list that doesn't end. I thought, you know, he wouldn't call me at three in the morning anymore just to see if I'd pick up. And I wouldn't be able to hold his hand, or yell at him if he spent too much money without thinking, and no one would ever call me Jane again –”

Her breath catches. She glances back now, towards the house, reminding herself that he's just inside. Then she laughs, and wipes under her good eye with her free hand, quick.

Blue leans into him, hair tickling his cheek, not caring that he's still covered in rain and blood-streaks. She says, “Nevermind. Just, well.” A long pause. “Ronan told me before– ...before. That he kissed you. Finally.” Her weight gets heavier against him. “He said that. ‘Finally.’ He sounded so annoyed.”

“Typical.”

Adam says this instead of what he wants, which is, _Ronan loves you, Blue, if he's willingly giving you these parts of himself_. He thinks maybe she knows.

(He says this instead of _I was afraid we wouldn't come out the other side._ Afraid that whatever tentative thing he and Ronan managed to find would be buried along with Gansey's body, under grief and guilt, until it was smothered for good.)

“I just think it's real good,” Blue says. She squeezes his hand. “So don't let it go, okay?”

“I'm trying not to,” he sighs.

“Good,” Blue repeats with a sniff, sounding stuffy. “And if you tell him I said something nice about him, I'll deny it.”

Adam laughs, just barely, and slides his hand out from under hers to drape his arm across her shoulders instead. They stay like that for who knows how long, side by side, half-listening to the muffled conversations inside. Then:

“Adam?”

Adam squashes his nose against her hair. It smells like earth and rain and bargain shampoo. Like Blue. “Hm?”

“I think Noah's gone.”

She whispers it: a confession told in the naked light of day. Afraid to be right. But the air feels emptier, even without Adam's immediate connection to Cabeswater. Something small and devastating quietly unravels inside his chest.

“Yeah.” His voice is rusty. He clears it. “I think he is, too.”

“I wish...” Blue pauses, and tucks in closer. “I don't know. He was so – at the end, he looked so...”

Un-Noah. More shadow than boy.

“I wanted–” she takes a little breath in, and Adam knows without looking that's she's crying. He loops his arm a little tighter around her shoulders.

“I wanted to say goodbye, is all. Tell him it's okay. Tell him we love him. Tell him I wasn't mad.”

“I know,” Adam tells her, because he does, and there isn't much else to say. For now, it'll have to be enough.

“Hey.”

Adam and Blue both turn to find Ronan in the doorway. He still has remnants of the terrible black ooze on his face and down his ears. Blue wipes her eyes with a fist, and Ronan tilts his head inside, a silent invitation to join everyone once more. 

A few breaths pass; Blue rises first. She pauses when she sidesteps across the threshold and steps in close to rest her forehead against Ronan’s chest briefly. Ronan blinks down at her, then cups the back of her head, letting his fingers comb through her hair as she pulls away and heads inside. He stares after her, for a beat, and then his eyes find Adam again.

“C'mon,” he says softly, and leans with his back against the door jamb.

Adam goes.

Long fingers grab hold of his wrist when he reaches the entryway. Adam looks down, and watches Ronan turn over his bruised and battered hand. It's the bad wrist, and he must wince, because Ronan stills, his grip loosens. Wordlessly, he holds Adam's knuckles to his mouth, lashes lowered. It such a startlingly, painfully intimate gesture that Adam's chest goes tight. 

It's hard to breathe: his body never learned how to process kindness after it's been hurt. 

_How long_ , he wants to ask, because a part of him needs to know, has needed to know since Ronan kissed him in his bedroom, but he just steadies himself with a grip on Ronan's elbow. Ronan shifts so their temples are matched up instead, on the side of Adam's good ear.

“Did you talk to Declan?”

“He's fine,” Ronan says, meaning Matthew. “Tired. Alive. I didn't,” he falters here, “I didn't want to tell Matthew about – about mom yet. I don't know – I can't. Declan’s already a wreck. He still thinks he's going to lose us both. He made me FaceTime him to prove I was in one piece.”

“To be fair,” Adam says, his voice only _just_ wavering, “you were almost killed.”

“Unmade,” Ronan corrects.

Adam thumps his head onto Ronan's shoulder. “ _Stop_ ,” he pleads.

Then his body makes an executive decision before his brain can catch up: the hand at Ronan’s elbow now touches the nape of his neck, soft and careful. With his other hand, Adam drags the very tips of his fingers down the length of Ronan’s back, where the sharp lines of his tattoo would be under his clothes. Ronan stands very, very still. 

_I miss you,_ Adam wants to say, even though they haven't been them long enough for him to miss anything.

“You kissed me,” he says aloud, good hand fisted in the fabric of Ronan's shirt. There's a restless sort of desperation building in him. “And we were happy for a little while, right? Then my hands and eyes were taken and you were being unmade and our best friend was dying and our _other_ best friend was leaving and – and your _mom_ , Ronan,” he says through a soft hiccup, and he feels Ronan's chest expand and retract, sharp, “and now it's sort of like we can't even breathe without breaking.”

"Parrish–”

“I just don't understand,” Adam says, looking up. “I don't know how to do this without it getting buried under everything else.”

Adam hears a sigh and then hands cup his face in a single, decisive movement. Ronan's lashes are stuck together, and he wears grief heavy across his shoulders – a suffocating, unbearable weight that never gets easier to bear – looking softer than Adam’s ever seen him. He’s at once impossibly old and young; equal parts magical, mystical Greywaren and lost child surrounded by the ghosts of the people he's loved.

He leans in, real close, and kisses Adam. It's short, close mouthed, and their noses brush afterwards, Adam only partly conscious of the movement after it's over. He keeps his eyes shut and leans up, only a bit, to touch his forehead to Ronan's. It doesn't feel new.

(Adam floats back down to earth on both feet and hears: _This. Hold onto this. We're not gone yet_.)

One of Ronan’s hand shifts to the side of Adam's neck before it drops. “C’mon, Parrish,” he says again, rubbing a fist along both eyes before sliding out between Adam and the doorway to head further inside. “Maura gave Orphan Girl a bath already. Gansey's staying.”

“The Barns?” Adam asks, and Ronan hesitates for the briefest of time before shaking his head without looking back. Not yet. “...With me, then,” Adam says.

Ronan stops walking at that. The voices inside are a little louder, now. Adam steps up next to him. They're all on their last legs; he just wants to sleep for an entire day, with this boy. He wants Ronan to dream of something simple for once, because he thinks Ronan can't take another night of being swallowed down by his sadness. 

He also thinks this might be love, but he's never known enough of it to be sure.

“It's small, but... it's always felt better with you there, anyway,” Adam finishes lamely, half-shrugging. "Stay with me for now."

Ronan just watches him for a moment.

And then he says, “Okay.” 

* * *

This time when Adam goes, stepping along Blue's front yard towards the BMW, Ronan doesn't just touch his good wrist – he slides their fingers together and holds on. Because he wants to. Because Adam wants him to. Because they are here, and they can.

Adam closes his eyes and breathes in. Ronan tugs on his hand; his nose brushes Adam's temple, and then his mouth follows after, as easy as anything has ever been done.

Adam opens his eyes, breathes out, and lets Ronan lead them home.

* * *


End file.
